White Castle (6 page)

During the next few hours I watched him slowly unravel: he’d write something critical about himself then tear it up without showing it to me, each time losing more of his self-confidence and self-respect, but then he’d begin again, hoping to recover what he’d lost. Supposedly he was going to show me his confessions; by nightfall I’d not seen one word of what I so longed to read, he’d ripped them all up and thrown them away, and his strength too was spent. When he shouted insults at me, saying this was a loathsome infidel’s game, his self-confidence was at such a low ebb I even replied brazenly that he would get used to not feeling regret, to being evil. He got up and left the house, perhaps because he couldn’t bear to be observed, and when he returned late I could tell from the perfume on him that, as I’d suspected, he’d been with prostitutes.

The next afternoon, to provoke him to continue working, I told Hoja he was surely strong enough not to be affected by such harmless games. Furthermore, we were doing this to learn something, not merely to pass the time, and in the end he would reach an understanding of why those he called fools were like that. Wasn’t the prospect of really knowing one another fascinating enough? A man would be as spellbound by someone knowing the smallest details of his soul as he would by a nightmare.

It was not what I said, which he took about as seriously as he did the flattery of a palace dwarf, but the security of daylight that prompted him to sit down again at the table. When he got up that evening, he believed in himself even less than he had the day before. When I saw him set off to the prostitutes again that night, I pitied him.

Thus every morning he would sit down at the table, believing himself capable of transcending the evils he would write of that day and hoping to regain what he’d lost the day before, then every evening get up having left on the table a little more of what self-confidence he still had. Since he now found himself contemptible he could no longer look upon me with contempt; I thought I had at last found some confirmation of the equality I’d wrongly believed existed between us in the first days we’d spent together; this pleased me very much. Because he was wary of me, he said I needn’t sit with him at the table; this too was a good sign, but my anger, gathering momentum for years, now grasped the bit between its teeth. I wanted to take revenge, to attack. Like him I had lost my balance. I felt that if I could make Hoja doubt himself just a little more, if I could read a few of those confessions he carefully kept from me and subtly humiliate him, then he would be the slave and sinner of the house, not I. There were already signs of this anyway: I could tell he needed now and then to be sure whether I was mocking him or not. He could no longer believe in himself, so had begun to seek my approval. He now asked my opinion more often on trivial daily affairs: were his clothes suitable, was the answer he’d given someone a good one, did I like his handwriting, what was I thinking? Not wanting him to despair completely and give up the game, I would sometimes criticize myself so as to raise his spirits. He’d give me that look that meant ‘you rogue’, but he no longer struck me; I was sure he thought he also deserved a beating.

I was extremely curious about these confessions that made him feel such self-hatred. Since I was accustomed to treating him as an inferior, even if only in secret, I thought they would consist of a few petty, insignificant sins. Now when I try to lend realism to my past, and tell myself to imagine in detail one or two of these confessions of which I never read one sentence, I somehow cannot find a sin Hoja could have committed that would destroy my story’s consistency and the life I have imagined for myself. But I suppose that someone in my position can learn to trust himself again: I must say that I brought Hoja to make a discovery without his realizing it, that I exposed him to his own weak points and those of people like him, even if not entirely decisively and frankly. I probably thought the day was not far off when I would tell him and the others what I thought of them; I would destroy them by proving how wicked they were. I believe that those who read my story realize by now that I must have learned as much from Hoja as he learned from me! Maybe I just think this way now because when we are old we all look for more symmetry, even in the stories we read. I must have boiled over with a resentment gathering force for years. After Hoja had thoroughly humiliated himself I would make him accept my superiority, or at least my independence, and then derisively demand my freedom. I was dreaming that he would set me free without even grumbling, thinking of how I would write books about my adventures among the Turks when I returned to my country. How easy it had been for me to lose all sense of proportion! The news he brought me one morning suddenly changed all that.

Plague had broken out in the city! Since he said this as if speaking of some other, far away place, not of Istanbul, I didn’t believe it at first; I asked how he’d heard the news, I wanted to know everything. The number of sudden deaths was rising for no apparent reason, presumably caused by some disease. I asked what the signs of illness were – perhaps it wasn’t plague after all. Hoja laughed at me: I shouldn’t worry, if I caught it I’d know beyond any doubt, a person had only three days of fever in which to find out. Some had swellings behind their ears, some under their armpits, on their bellies, buboes developed, then a fever took over; sometimes the boils burst, sometimes blood spewed from the lungs, there were those who died coughing violently like consumptives. He added that people from every district were dying in threes and fives. Anxious, I asked about our own neighbourhood. Hadn’t I heard? A bricklayer who quarrelled with all the neighbours because their chickens were getting in through his wall, had died screaming with fever just one week ago. Only now did everyone realize that he’d died of the plague.

But I still didn’t want to believe it; outside in the streets everything looked so normal, people passing by the window were so calm, I needed to find someone to share my alarm if I were to believe the plague was here. The next morning, when Hoja went to school, I flew out into the streets. I searched out the Italian converts I’d managed to meet during the eleven years I had spent here. One of them, known by his new name Mustafa Reis, had left for the dockyards; the other, Osman Efendi, wouldn’t let me in at first although I knocked at his door as though I would beat it down with my fists. He had his servant say he wasn’t at home but finally gave in and shouted after me. How could I still question whether the disease was real; didn’t I see those coffins being carried down the street? He said I was scared, he could see it in my face, I was scared because I remained faithful to Christianity! He scolded me; a man must be a Muslim to be happy here, but he neglected to press my hand before he retreated into the dank darkness of his own house, didn’t touch me at all. It was the hour of prayer, and when I saw the crowds in the courtyards of the mosques, I was seized with fear and started for home. I was overcome by the bewilderment that strikes people at moments of disaster. It was as if I had lost my past, as though my memory had been drained, I was paralysed. When I saw a group carrying a funeral bier through the streets of our neighbourhood it completely unnerved me.

Hoja had come back from the school, I sensed he was pleased when he saw how I was. I noticed that my fear increased his self-confidence and this made me uneasy. I wanted him to be rid of this vain pride in his fearlessness. Trying to check my agitation, I poured out all my medical and literary knowledge; I described what I remembered from the scenes of plague in Hippocrates, Thucydides and Boccacio, said it was believed the disease was contagious, but this only made him more contemptuous – he didn’t fear the plague; disease was God’s will, if a man was fated to die he would die; for this reason it was useless to talk cowardly nonsense as I did about shutting oneself up in one’s house and severing relations with the outside or trying to escape from Istanbul. If it was written, so it would come to pass, death would find us. Why was I afraid? Because of those sins of mine I’d written down day after day? He smiled, his eyes shining with certainty.

Until the day we lost one another I was never able to find out if he really believed what he said. Seeing him so completely undaunted I had been afraid for a moment, but then, when I remembered our discussions at the table, those terrifying games we played, I became sceptical. He was circling around, steering the conversation to the sins we’d written down together, reiterating the same idea with an air of conceit that drove me wild: if I was so afraid of death I couldn’t have mastered the wickedness I appeared to write about so bravely. The courage I showed in pouring out my sins was simply the result of my shamelessness! Whereas he had hesitated at the time because he was so painstakingly attentive to the tiniest fault. But now he was calm, the deep confidence he felt in the face of the plague had left no doubt in his heart that he must be innocent.

Repelled by this explanation, which I stupidly believed, I decided to argue with him. Naïvely I suggested that he was confident not because he had a clear conscience but because he did not know that death was so near. I explained how we could protect ourselves from death, that we must not touch those who had caught the plague, that the corpses must be buried in limed pits, that people must reduce their contact with one another as much as possible, and that Hoja must not go to that crowded school.

It seems this last thing I said gave him ideas even more horrible than the plague. The next day at noon, saying he’d touched each of the children at school one by one, he stretched out his hands towards me; when he saw me balk, that I was afraid to touch him, he came closer and embraced me with glee; I wanted to scream, but like someone in a dream, I couldn’t cry out. As for Hoja, he said, with a derisiveness I only learned to understand much later, that he was going to teach me fearlessness.

6

The plague was spreading quickly, but I somehow could not learn what Hoja called fearlessness. At the same time I wasn’t as cautious as I had been at first. I could not stand any longer to be cooped up in one room like an ailing old woman, staring out the window for days on end. Once in a while I’d burst out into the street like a drunkard, watch the women shopping in the market-place, the tradesmen working in their shops, the men gathering in the coffeehouses after burying their dear ones, and try to learn to live with the plague. I might have done so, but Hoja would not leave me in peace.

Every night he’d reach for me with the hands he said he’d touched people with all day long. I’d wait without moving a muscle. You know how when, barely awake, you realize a scorpion is crawling over you and freeze, still as a statue – like that. His fingers did not resemble mine; running them coolly over my flesh Hoja would ask: ‘Are you afraid?’ I would not move. ‘You’re afraid. What are you afraid of?’ Sometimes I’d feel an impulse to shove him away and fight, but I knew this would increase his rage even more. ‘I’ll tell you why you are afraid. You’re afraid because you are guilty. You’re afraid because you are steeped in sin. You’re frightened because you believe in me more than I believe in you.’

And it was he who insisted we must sit down at the two ends of the table and write together. Now was the time to write why we were what we were. But again he ended up writing nothing more than why ‘the others’ were the way they were. For the first time he proudly showed me what he wrote. When I thought how he expected me to be humbled by what I read I could not hide my revulsion and told him he was no different from the fools he wrote about and that he would die before me.

I decided then that this prediction was my most effective weapon, and reminded him of his ten-years’ labour, of the years he’d spent on theories of cosmography, the observations of the heavens he’d made at the expense of his eyesight, of the days he’d never taken his nose out of a book. Now it was I who would not leave him in peace; I said how foolish it would be for him to die in vain while it was possible to avoid the plague and go on living. By saying these things I increased not only his doubts but my punishments. I noticed then he seemed, as he read what I wrote, to grudgingly rediscover the respect for me he’d lost.

So as to forget my bad fortune in those days I filled page after page with the happy dreams I often had, not only at night, but during my midday naps as well. Trying to forget everything, as soon as I awoke I’d write down those dreams in which action and meaning were one, taking great pains to make my style poetic: I dreamt there were people living in the woods by our house who had solved the mysteries that for years we had wanted to understand, and if you dared to enter the darkness of the woods you became friends with them; our shadows were not extinguished with the setting of the sun, but took on a life of their own, mastering the thousand little things that we should have mastered while we slept peacefully in our clean, cool beds; the beautiful, three-dimensional people in the tableaux I fashioned in my dreams stepped out of their picture-frames and mingled among us; my mother, my father and I set up steel machines in our back garden to do our work for us...

Hoja was not unaware that these dreams were devilish traps that would drag him into the darkness of a deadly science, but still he continued to question me, realizing that he lost a bit more of his self-confidence with every question: what did these silly dreams mean, did I really see them? Thus I first practised on him what we would do together years later with the sultan; I derived conclusions from our dreams about both of our futures: it was obvious that once infected by a fascination with science, a man could no more escape it than he could the plague; it wasn’t hard to say that this addiction had taken hold of Hoja, but still I wondered about Hoja’s dreams! He listened, openly mocking me, but since he had swallowed his pride to the extent of asking questions, he could not arouse my resentment much; and I could see that my answers aroused his curiosity. As I saw that the equanimity Hoja affected with the plague’s appearance was being disturbed, my own fear of death did not diminish, but at least I no longer felt alone in my fear. Of course I paid the price of his nightly torments, but now I realized my struggle was not in vain: as he stretched out his hands toward me I told Hoja again that he would die before I did, and reminded him that those who were not afraid were ignorant, that his writings were left half-finished, that my dreams he’d read that day were full of happiness.

However, it wasn’t what I said that brought matters to a head but something else. One day the father of a student of his at school came to the house. He seemed an innocuous, humble little man, said he lived in our neighbourhood. I listened, curled up in a corner like a sleepy house-cat, while they talked for a long time about this and that. Then our guest blurted out what he’d been dying to say: his cousin on his father’s side had been left a widow last summer when her husband fell from the roof he was retiling. She now had many suitors, but our visitor had thought of Hoja because he’d heard from the neighbours that he was considering proposals of marriage. Hoja reacted more brutally than I’d expected: he said he did not want to marry, but even if he had he wouldn’t take a widow. Upon this our visitor reminded us that the Prophet Muhammad had not minded Hadije’s widowhood and even taken her as his first wife. Hoja said he’d heard of this widow, that she wasn’t worth the saintly Hadije’s little finger. Upon this our peculiar, proud neighbour wanted to make Hoja understand he himself was no prize either and said that although he didn’t believe it, the neighbours were saying that Hoja had completely gone out of his mind, no one took as favourable signs all his stargazing, his playing with lenses and making strange clocks. With the spleen of a merchant criticizing the goods he intends to buy, our visitor added that the neighbours were saying that Hoja ate his food at a table like an infidel instead of sitting down cross-legged; that after paying purse upon purse of money for books, he threw them on the floor and trod on the pages in which the Prophet’s name was written; that, unable to placate the devil within him by gazing at the sky for hours, he lay on his bed in broad daylight gazing at his dirty ceiling, took pleasure not in women but only young boys, I was his twin brother, he didn’t fast during Ramadan and the plague had been sent on his account.

After he got rid of the visitor Hoja had a tantrum. I concluded that the complacency he derived from sharing the same attitudes that others held, or from pretending to do so, had come to an end. Wanting to deal him one last blow, I said that those who did not fear the plague were as stupid as this fellow. He became apprehensive, but asserted that he did not fear the plague either. Whatever the reason, I decided he had said this sincerely. He was extremely nervous, could not find anything to do with his hands, and kept repeating his refrain, lately forgotten, about the ‘fools’. After nightfall he lit the lamp, placed it at the centre of the table, and said we would sit down. We must write.

Like two bachelors telling each other’s fortunes to pass the time on endless winter nights, we sat at the table face to face, scratching out something or other on the empty pages before us. The absurdity of it! In the morning when I read what Hoja had written as his dream I found him even more ridiculous than I did myself. He had written down a dream in imitation of mine, but as everything about it made clear, this was a fantasy which had never been dreamt at all: he had us as brothers! He’d found it appropriate to play the role of elder to me while I listened obediently to his scientific lectures. The next morning as we ate breakfast he asked what I made of the neighbours’ gossip about our being twins. This question pleased me but did not flatter my pride; I said nothing. Two days later he woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that this time he had really dreamt that dream he wrote down. Perhaps it was true, but for some reason I didn’t care. The next night he confessed he was afraid to die of plague.

Oppressed by being shut up in the house, I’d gone out into the streets at twilight: children were climbing trees in a garden and had left their colourful shoes on the ground; chattering women in line at the fountains no longer fell silent as I walked by; the market-places were full of shoppers; there were street brawls and people trying to break them up and others enjoying the spectacle. I tried to make myself believe that the epidemic had played itself out, but when I saw the coffins emerging one after another from the courtyard of the Beyazit Mosque I panicked and rushed home. As I entered my room Hoja called out: ‘Come and have a look at this, will you.’ His shirt unbuttoned, he was pointing to a small swelling, a red spot below his navel. ‘There are so many insects around.’ I came closer and looked carefully, it was a small red spot, slightly swollen, like a large insect bite, but why was he showing it to me? I was afraid to bring my face any nearer. ‘An insect bite,’ said Hoja, ‘don’t you think?’ He touched the swelling with the tip of his finger. ‘Or is it a flea bite?’ I was silent, I didn’t say I had never seen a flea bite like that.

I found some excuse to stay in the garden until sunset. I realized I must not stay in this house any longer, but I had no place in mind where I could go. And that spot really did look like an insect bite, it was not as prominent and broad as a plague bubo; but a little later my thoughts took another turn: perhaps because I was wandering in the garden among the flourishing plants, it seemed to me that the red spot would swell up within two days, open like a flower, and burst, that Hoja would die, painfully. I told myself it might be an abscess caused by indigestion, but no, it looked like an insect bite, I thought I’d remember which insect it was in a moment, it had to be one of those huge nocturnal flying insects which thrive in tropical climates, but the name of the phantom-like creature would not even rise to the tip of my tongue.

When we sat down to dinner Hoja tried to pretend he was in good spirits, he joked, teased me, but he couldn’t keep this up for long. Much later, after we had risen from the dinner we ate without speaking and the night, windless and silent, had settled in, Hoja said, ‘I feel uneasy. My thoughts are heavy. Let’s sit at the table and write.’ Apparently this was the only way he could distract himself.

But he couldn’t write. He sat idly watching me out of the corner of his eye while I wrote contentedly. ‘What are you writing?’ I read to him about how impatient I’d been returning home for vacation in a one-horse carriage after my first year of studies in engineering. But I had loved both the school and my friends; I read to him how I’d missed them while I sat alone on the bank of a stream reading the books I’d taken with me on vacation. After a short silence Hoja, as if revealing a secret, whispered suddenly: ‘Do they always live happily like that there?’ I thought he’d regret it as soon as he asked, but he was still looking at me with childish curiosity. I whispered too: ‘I was happy!’ A shadow of envy passed over his face, but it was not threatening. Shyly, haltingly, he told his story.

When he was twelve years old living in Edirne, there had been a period when he used to go with his mother and sister to the hospital of Beyazit Mosque to visit his mother’s father who suffered from a stomach ailment. In the morning his mother would leave his brother, who was still too young to walk, at the neighbours, take Hoja, his sister, and a pot of pudding she’d prepared earlier, and they would set out together; the journey was short but delightful, along a road shaded with poplar trees. His grandfather would tell them stories. Hoja loved those stories, but loved the hospital more and would run off to wander through its courtyards and halls. On one visit he listened to music being played for the mental patients, under the lantern of a great dome; there was also the sound of water, flowing water; he’d wander through other rooms where strange, colourful bottles and jars shone brightly; another time he lost his way, started to cry, and they’d taken him to every room in the whole hospital one by one before finding his grandfather Abdullah Efendi’s room; sometimes his mother cried, sometimes she listened with her daughter to the old man’s stories. Then they’d leave with the empty pot grandfather had given back to them, but before they reached the house his mother would buy them halva and whisper, ‘Let’s eat it before anyone sees us.’ They’d go to a secret place by a stream under the poplars where the three of them would sit with their toes dangling in the water, eating where no one could see them.

When Hoja finished talking a silence descended, making us uneasy while bringing us closer together with an unaccountable feeling of brotherhood. For a long time Hoja ignored the tension in the air. Later, after the heavy door of a nearby house was thoughtlessly slammed, he said he’d first felt his interest in science then, inspired by the patients and those colourful bottles, jars, and scales that brought them health. But after his grandfather died they did not go there again. Hoja had always dreamed he would grow up and return alone, but one year the Tunja River which flows through Edirne flooded without warning, the patients were removed from their beds, the rooms were filled with filthy, turbid water and when it finally receded that beautiful hospital remained buried for years under an accursed, stinking mud that could not be cleaned away.

As Hoja again fell silent our moment of intimacy was lost. He’d risen from the table, out of the corner of my eye I saw his shadow pacing the room, then taking the lamp from the middle of the table he stepped behind me, and I could see neither Hoja nor his shadow; I wanted to turn around and look but didn’t; it was as if I were afraid, expecting something evil. A moment later, hearing the rustle of clothes being taken off, I turned around apprehensively. He was standing in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up, carefully examining his chest and abdomen in the light of the lamp. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what kind of pustule is this?’ I remained silent. ‘Come and look at this, will you?’ I didn’t stir. He shouted, ‘Come here, I say!’ Fearfully I approached him like a student about to be punished.